It has been weeks of “great bewilderment and dismay” for the people of Ukraine as the embattled nation’s relationship with the Trump administration and the United States appeared to unravel before their eyes, according to Metropolitan Archbishop Borys Gudziak of Philadelphia, the leader of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the United States.

This summer, Archbishop Gudziak made his 58th visit to Ukraine since Russian aggression first began with the seizure of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Over those scores of visits, he has traveled across the nation and come as close as a mile to the front lines with Russian forces.

He has met with Ukrainian politicians, members of government and with “mothers and widows, orphans, disabled veterans, soldiers on the front, school teachers, university students, mayors and run-of-the-mill citizens.”

In all of those conversations, he said, “I did not meet people that spoke of giving up.”

A sudden Trump reversal

On Oct. 9, the relationship between the two allied states began sharply deteriorating when U.S. President Donald Trump announced a deal to buy diesel fuel from the Russian Federation. But the president did not stop there, first demanding that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky cease strategic strikes on Russian oil refineries and fuel storage sites, then suggesting that the Ukrainian president should “step aside” or call for new elections. Concerns next emerged about the reliability of U.S. intelligence sharing, and slowdowns and interruptions in the Starlink and Starshield satellite services crucial for battlefield drone operation and detecting incoming drones and missiles from Russia followed.

The president waived trade and economic sanctions authorized under the Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, a law that Mr. Trump had just signed in September after it passed Congress with strong bipartisan support. On Oct. 19, a day when a Russian drone strike on a crowded park in the Kharkiv region killed six people, including three children, Mr. Trump said that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” adding, “they haven’t been doing much.”

Among the dead after that strike on Nova Vodolaha were an infant killed in her stroller and the baby’s mother.

The president’s conciliatory remarks about Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, came just days after U.N. officials reported a surge in civilian casualties in Ukraine. At least 328 Ukrainian civilians had been killed in September, according to the United Nations, 85 percent more than in September 2025. More than 2,100 civilians were wounded last month, according to the report.

“Casualties were recorded across 22 regions and the city of Kyiv, where civilians were killed or injured on 22 of the month’s 30 days, more often than in any month since the start of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion,” U.N. officials said.

By Oct. 21, the collapse of the relationship between Ukraine and the Trump administration appeared complete, with the U.S. president touting as a diplomatic coup the release of an American citizen living in Ukraine who had been illegally detained by Russian forces in 2022 and abused in captivity. His special envoy, the real estate developer Steve Witkoff, offered a gushing description of Mr. Putin as a “humanitarian” in the same category as Mr. Trump.

If support from the United States is truly lost, Archbishop Gudziak said, it will be difficult for Ukraine to survive a conflict brought upon its people by its powerful neighbor, but he knows that Ukrainians are determined to carry on with or without help from the Trump administration. “People are tired,” he said in an interview with America on Oct. 19. “People are exhausted, but they in unison say we have to keep strong and resist.”

They have no other choice, he explained, “because Russian occupation means genocide.”

“The message from Moscow is annihilation,” Archbishop Gudziak said, “and were there any doubt, one needs only to listen to Putin, who constantly repeats, ‘There is no such thing as the Ukrainian nation’; ‘There is no real Ukrainian language’; ‘The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is part of the Russian Orthodox Church.’”

“It’s a language of negation, of canceling, and the fact that it is reiterated, repeatedly, convinces Ukrainians that they need to resist,” he said. As do the Russian state’s continuing acts of drone and missile terror, he said, noting that more than a hundred civilians are being killed “in their homes, on their streets” each week by “wanton bombing of civilian infrastructure.”

“So on the one hand, there’s great fatigue, and yet there continues to be resolve.”

“Everywhere there is Russian occupation, there are war crimes,” he said. Ukrainian soldiers have discovered mass graves after liberating Bucha, Izium, Borodyanka and other communities. That brutality has been a consistent reality of various eras of Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory since the 18th century, he said, continuing through the many calamities and crimes against humanity experienced in the 20th century by Ukrainians, when as many as 15 million of them perished.

In territory controlled by Russia, he said, the Ukrainian Catholic Church is driven underground, its priests arrested and expelled. Thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted and taken to Russia, where they face indoctrination and cultural obliteration. In occupied Ukrainian territory, according to Archbishop Gudziak, the men are conscripted into the Russian army and forced to participate in the dismemberment of their own country.

Putin has lost; Ukraine has not yet won

Given these certainties and with Mr. Putin’s unwavering ambition to absorb Ukraine and continue his dream of a restoration of the imperial map of the former Soviet Union, Ukraine will fight on, he said. He wonders how Mr. Trump could possibly believe that the Russian leader would be content to only take full control of the contested Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, attempting to secure a territorial victory through discussions with the Trump administration that he has been unable to achieve on the battlefield.

At this critical moment, he said, “there needs to be clarity … on what is happening on the ground in terms of the war.”

“The fact of the matter is that in the last months, losing 1,000 soldiers a day, having what purports to be the second-strongest army in the world, which has made virtually no progress, [Mr. Putin] has failed on all of his war goals.”

“He has failed to topple the [Ukrainian] government; he has failed to capture Kyiv, has failed to capture the Donbas; he has failed to weaken NATO—NATO has two additional members extending the NATO frontier directly bordering with the Russian Federation—and he has forced virtually every European country to amplify its military spending.”

“So Russia has lost,” Archbishop Gudziak said. But “Ukraine has not yet won.”

The president’s reversal and consistent diplomatic outreach without demands to Russia have not come entirely as a shock, Archbishop Gudziak said. They are just more evidence of what has been years of failure among Western political leaders and members of the public “outside of Ukraine” to understand Ukraine’s suffering and what remains at stake if Mr. Putin’s ambitions are not thwarted.

After previous Russian aggression in 2014 and then its full-scale invasion in 2022, many Western leaders seemed to agree with Mr. Putin that Ukraine could not stand against the might of the Russian army. The policy of the West has been “guided by fear, and fear is not the best of advisers,” Archbishop Gudziak said.

Mr. Trump has frequently noted that Mr. Zelensky “doesn’t have the cards,” presuming an eventual win by the Russian Federation. Ukraine has consistently defied that assessment.

As Ukraine continues to frustrate the vast power of the Russian Federation, Archbishop Gudziak said it appears more clearly that “a resolute response in 2014” when Russia seized Crimea would have prevented further aggression. “And if there had been a resolute response and comprehensive and decisive aid to Ukraine in the spring and summer of ’22,” he added, “this war may have been over.”

What is at stake for the Western alliance, previously anchored by the power and resolve of the United States, is deeper than the fate of Ukraine in its struggle to resist a genocidal absorption by Russia. Ukraine is a token for other smaller states coming up against stronger neighbors who believe their power defines borders and spheres of influence. Archbishop Gudziak noted that Taiwan stands in similar peril against mainland China.

“It’s very important to remind ourselves of the fact that Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in December 1994 at a time when the number of warheads that Ukraine had was greater than that of the arsenals of France, the United Kingdom and China combined,” he said.

Ukraine wanted peace, to escape totalitarianism, to establish a liberal democracy and grow closer to the free societies of Europe, according to Archbishop Gudziak. “It not only unilaterally disarmed, it believed in the security guarantees, articulated by the U.S., Great Britain and Russia [under then-President Boris Yeltsin], which promised to guarantee Ukrainian territorial integrity, independence and to refrain from any economic pressure on Ukraine as an independent country.”

“In no respect was Ukraine interested in any aggression, in any manner; it was a peaceful country with a nascent democracy.”

If the United States follows the path apparently being laid by the Trump administration to abandon commitments made in 1994 under the Budapest Memorandum, Archbishop Gudziak believes other small nations will have little choice but to conclude that the only security guarantee they can rely on will be development and possession of nuclear weapons themselves—a calamity for the geopolitical order.

While that threat looms and Ukraine’s sovereignty and self-determination appear again in profound peril, Archbishop Gudziak said American Catholics can play a positive role. He urged foremost prayer for peace and the preservation of Ukraine and its people; he urged constituent pressure on American politicians to live up to commitments made to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and reverse the Trump administration’s art-of-the-deal appeasement of Mr. Putin.

Finally, he suggested that those who wish to do more should consider providing material support through donations to Catholic organizations that have played a prominent role in humanitarian assistance as the war drags on, among them the U.S. Ukrainian church’s Healing of Wounds of the War in Ukraine Fund, the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, Aid to the Church in Need, Catholic Relief Services and Caritas-Ukraine.

More from America

A deeper dive

The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past each week. Some recent reports: “Trump calls off livestreamed execution after backlash. Have Americans finally had enough of the death penalty?” and “St. Louis archdiocese sues DHS and ICE to bring sacraments to immigrant detainees.”

For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches. This week: “The miraculous Peruvian devotion that is surely close to Pope Leo’s heart” and “He crossed the U.S. border illegally. Now he’s Pope Leo’s bishop in West Virginia.” and “He could have been a candidate for assisted suicide in Canada. He wants a more hopeful solution.”

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).